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“It’s her shadow,” Leo said. He inched closer, swinging one muscled arm out to keep Lily behind him.
“How is that even possible?”
Matty’s chin lifted, defiance and superiority written all over that smug expression.
“You know what, it doesn’t matter. Get out of him.”
He moved slowly. We were all moving slowly, each of us waiting for someone else to act. If I’d thought for a second I might be able to grab him and rip that thing out of him, I would have. But I didn’t even know if he was still... him.
Was that really my brother’s body? If it was, was he still in there somewhere?
What if this was all one big, fucked up glamour? Or a dream?
I shook my head against that last thought. Dreams had a different feel to them. Close to reality, but not quite. Like artificial vanilla. I would give anything for this to be a figment of my exhausted imagination, but it all felt way too real.
I held up a hand, the one without the pendant, in an attempt to show the shadow I wasn’t a threat. Which wasn’t entirely true since my dagger was tucked in the back of my jeans. “Where’s my brother?”
A wicked smile twisted Matty’s lips, but he said nothing.
“What do you want?” I ground out.
The thing had to want something, right? It wouldn’t have hitched a ride in my brother’s body just for the fun of it.
His eyes narrowed, dropping to my half-hidden hand. The pendant suddenly felt like a hundred-pound weight in my grip.
“This?” I held it up, letting it dangle an inch from my fingers. “If I give you this, will you get the hell out of him?”
The pendant had done its job. It got us back to our world, and yet, the idea of giving it up hit me all wrong. It was the kind of wrong that sank into my bones, but I didn’t have the luxury of examining that feeling. Not if letting the pendant go meant getting the demon’s shadow out of my brother’s body.
“No.” Leo’s voice boomed in my small living room. “You can’t let it have that magic.”
“I can do whatever the fuck I need to do,” I said, my gaze bouncing between them.
Lily stepped around Leo, either oblivious to her nakedness or utterly unconcerned by it. “Listen to him, Never. That pendant holds too much power to let it fall into the wrong hands.” Her words were calm and rational, and for a second, I saw the companion I’d shared my entire life with. The same big, brown eyes. The same energy.
She took another step forward, and I moved instinctively, putting my body between her and Matty. Demon possession or no, no one was getting close to my brother right now. Even her.
The next thing I knew, pain exploded on the side of my head, and I was dragged to the floor, barely managing to keep hold of the damned necklace.
Matty was on me in a second, pinning me with his weight. I bucked hard, but it had almost no effect. Either I’d gotten weaker over the last few days, or the shadow had imbued my brother’s seventeen-year-old body with a hell of a lot more strength than it normally possessed.
One of his hands wrapped around my neck, while the other went for the pendant. I did the only thing I could think of and shoved my hand under my own back. It wasn’t like I could risk throwing the thing.
The move worked, sort of. The demon/shadow creature couldn’t get to it with my body on top of it, but I paid for that bit of cleverness. Matty’s weight pinned me to the floor, wrenching my shoulder painfully and smashing my fist between my back and the floor. Then my air was cut off completely.
The grip he had on my throat wasn’t a warning. He wasn’t trying to make a point or scare me. My kid brother was genuinely trying to crush my windpipe.
That terrifying realization hit a heartbeat before that deadly grip was ripped away, painfully, with those inhumanly strong fingers clawing at my sweaty skin as Leo’s big body slammed into him.
“No!” My voice was already scratchy and hoarse, but I forced it.
What if Matty was still in there? I’d talked to him in Hook’s world, right? Before this nightmare.
I couldn’t let Leo hurt him.
Leo hauled my much smaller brother up by his neck. The bellow of anger that had been pouring from Matty’s mouth dried up, and those black eyes flickered back to blue an instant before Leo hurled him into the television.
“Stop!” I dragged myself up, shoved the pendant in my pocket, and grabbed Leo’s wrist before he could stalk over and smash my poor brother to smithereens. “It’s him.” I coughed on the words, my throat already swelling from the damage Matty’s hand had inflicted. “He’s in there.”
